User:Nimbuspumpkin

Bio

About Me

My hobbies include: drumming, playing guitar, playing video games, coding (mainly python, I am currently learning machine learning and unreal engine 4), playing paintball with my friends, and watching football, baseball, hockey, and rugby.

I enjoy listening to metal music with Avantasia, Slipknot, and Dragonforce being some of my favorite bands to listen to. I also enjoy spreadsheets, looking around on google maps, and data tracking. The first spreadsheet program for computers was VisiCalc, created by Danial Bricklin and Bob Frankston.

My Wikipedia Interests

Things I can contribute to include: expanding sports stats pages, explaining sports stats pages in a more thorough and in depth way, and explaining sports terms and jargon. I can also contribute to organization of articles to make them more clear to viewers.

Article Evaluation

With Slipknot being one of my favorite bands I decided to read more about their members from the members Wikipedia pages. I visited the Sid Wilson article on Wikipedia and found three aspects on it worth commenting on: the lack of citations, the poor quality of the sources, and poor organization.  

Lack Of Citations

The article in question does have citations but they can be vague and it is very hard to see which statements come from which sources. One example is the last sentence in the first paragraph of the biography section of the article which states, “He is also known to stage dive in Slipknot's early years, and in 2008, he broke both his heels when he jumped ten feet from the stage,” but has no citation attached to it. Another instance is the second paragraph in the mask section which has no citation for the one-sentence paragraph. This lack of citations masks it very hard to see where these facts are being derived from which hurts the credibility of the article.

Poor Quality Of Sources

Even when citations are being added to statements, a few of the sources are questionable at best. For example, the first source is an IMDB page. Which, like Wikipedia, can be edited by the general population, but unlike Wikipedia does not have the sources listed. His IMDB page has his age as 22 even though it says that he was born in 1977. Sources 9 and 10 seem to be blog posts about the authors’ view of the new slipknot masks and in the case of reference 9 the new slipknot video, not material released from the band like an interview or official news post.

Poor Organization

The article also has some poor organization. One display of this are the sentences in the first paragraph about DJ Starscream can be moved down to the DJ Starscream section of the biography, as they did with the SID section. Another example is the opening sentence of the last paragraph of the mask section. Most of the paragraph discusses the “Devil In I” mask but the opening statement is unrelated to the rest of the paragraph.

Conclusion

The main qualities that hurt the article are the lack of citations and poor sources. The lack of citations makes it hard to verify the information being said in the article. The poor quality of the sources hurts the credibility as well because the information said in the Wikipedia article can be wrong. The poor organization also leads to the article seeming jumbled and hard to navigate.